


This Rotten Work

by BeaArthurPendragon



Series: I'll Light Your Way Home [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst with a Happy Ending, But not with Bucky, Divorce, Established Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, POV Steve Rogers, PTSD, Past Infidelity, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Prostitution, Protective Bucky Barnes, Regret, Sickfic, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicidal Thoughts, Vietnam War, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:28:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25016992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon
Summary: He hates how awful he feels, but he doesn’t want to fight it, wants to feel every ache and chill and headache, wants to surrender to the weakness, wants to let it beat him up, let it eat him alive, let it humiliate him, this microscopic ghost he’s carried home from the scene of crime after crime after crime.After building a fragile new balance in New York following his military service in Southeast Asia, a relapse of malaria sends Steve into a tailspin of regrets, but Buck won't leave his side.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: I'll Light Your Way Home [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1370089
Comments: 29
Kudos: 125





	This Rotten Work

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a few things: Watching people I know struggling to nurse their loved ones with coronavirus at home when the hospitals got too full, and the criminally throwaway line Steve had in CACW about having done some things during WWII that made him not sleep so well at night. I wanted to explore that.
> 
> PLEASE MIND THE TAGS. This isn't a dark!Steve but it is a very angsty Steve reckoning with his military service in the covert war in Laos during the Vietnam War, his slow, painful coming out, and the marriage to Peggy he blew up along the way. There's a lot of hurt here and no perfect resolution (some of these threads may be picked up in a later fic) but there is healing and hope, as usual.
> 
> Some potential content warnings/notes: Steve has a lot of internalized homophobia and shame and ignorance, and you see him really struggling with that. Also, I was not able to find a ton of information about what brothels like The Orchid might have looked like 50 years ago, so this is my best (and no doubt very imperfect) guess. I sincerely welcome any feedback on making that more accurate.
> 
> You will want to read the earlier fics in this series first.
> 
> Finally: Thanks to shay081793 for their beta work!

_Pylades: I’ll take care of you.  
__Orestes: It’s rotten work.  
__Pylades: Not to me. Not if it’s you.  
_—Anne Carson, “Oresteia”

**_  
July 1, 1970_ **

For the first time since moving to the day shift, Steve finds himself wide awake at five in the morning on Sunday mornings, watching the sun rise across his lover’s sleeping face, scattering flecks of red through the dark tangled hair spread across his pillow and warming the ever-so-faint cinnamon sprinkle of freckles across his nose and cheeks. Buck smells of cigarette smoke and whiskey and sweat and sex and something else, something distinctly _him_ , and there is nothing sweeter—nothing—in the world to Steve than this.

It’s been nine months since he walked into Josie’s for the first time and accidentally locked eyes with the bartender. Tall and slender in a Rolling Stones t-shirt, maybe a decade younger than Steve, with fashionable sideburns and thick dark hair curling in the late-summer heat around his ears and chin, Buck had nodded with a come-hither insouciance that gave Steve just enough courage to approach.

Steve’s ashamed to admit that it was the plastic arm with the hook at the end and a peeling sticker reading _Property of the U.S. Government_ pasted to the socket like a tattoo that made him feel safe around the bartender, made him think the man would sympathize with how desperately out of place Steve felt just then. Made him think they had something in common.

They did, of course—the same thing so many men had in common these days—the war. Buck had served a year and change as a grunt in ‘Nam before a grenade chewed up his body, while Steve had just ended 15 years of service with three tours with as a Green Beret in Laos—though he wasn’t allowed to talk about that, so he just told people he was in ‘Nam too.

Buck had bought him a few drinks and they’d chatted between customers while Steve tried to memorize the exact blue-gray shade of Buck’s eyes, but mostly he’d sat in the corner and watched Buck work.

He liked watching Buck work, liked watching him field rapidfire orders from memory, flirt and joke with the regulars, light their cigarettes and blow kisses when they tipped him well, expertly work the taps and punch the keys on the register with his hook like he’d been born to it.

He liked that Buck didn’t try to hide the arm, that he didn’t seem embarrassed about it—that he was still what Steve suspected was his usual lively, clever, charming self despite it. God, he’d caught himself making so many condescending assumptions in the beginning—but if Buck noticed, he didn’t say so. That was a kindness Steve didn’t deserve, and he was grateful for it. He’d brought Buck home that night and he’s been bringing him home every Friday and Saturday night since.

He loves watching Buck sleep. There’s a peace that comes over his face when he does, when that busy little monster in his mind that can’t leave the war behind finally collapses into exhaustion. Sometimes it wakes before the rest of him does, leaving Buck gasping and tense and unable to fall asleep again, but it’s happening less and less now, and one day, Steve hopes, the day will come when it never wakes him up again.

Steve’s got a busy little monster of his own, but his is a different breed, one less concerned with infecting his sleep with memories of the violence he witnessed and more inclined to catch him up short with a highlight reel of the violence he’d committed instead, flooding him with shame so acute he can barely breathe. Par for the course for a good Catholic boy, he supposes.

He’d told Buck, back in the beginning, that he sought out the night gig with the Port Authority because he hadn’t been ready to face how much his old neighborhood had changed in the 15 years since he’d left. But the truth was, the truth he hadn’t been able to tell Buck yet was that he wasn’t ready for his neighborhood to see how much _he_ had changed instead.

He’d done it because he realized how afraid he was to show himself in the light, to go among ordinary people and try to convince them that he could be one of them, a man who had not shot more men than he could count or accidentally gotten two dozen civilians killed or married a woman he could never truly love in the hopes she could change him.

He’d worked nights so the world could not see that on his last R&R in Bangkok he’d hired a male prostitute to help him understand his own urges or that afterwards, too ashamed to tell his wife just how unfaithful he’d been, he’d simply written her to tell her that she might as well file for divorce because when his hitch was up, he wasn’t coming home.

A powerful exhaustion settles over him as a headache begins to blossom behind his eyes, and he sighs ruefully. He’s such a big guy that he’s usually not capable of getting drunk enough for a hangover, but this morning he feels like he got hit by a truck. It must have been the whiskey shots, he thinks blearily as he curls back up with his pillow. He’ll have to remember to stick to beer.

A strong chill shakes him and he pulls the covers around him more tightly. _Weird_ , he thinks, _it was so hot last night_. He curls up against Buck for warmth and drifts back to sleep.

*****

“Stevie,” Buck says softly, urgently, shaking his shoulder. “Stevie, wake up.”

Steve makes an indistinct noise and rolls over, wincing as his muscles scream in pain from the movement. His eyes don’t want to seem to focus; Buck is just a vague smear against the brilliant afternoon sun streaming through the window.

“You’re burning up,” Buck says anxiously, pressing a cool hand to Steve’s forehead. “Let me help you get a cool shower.”

“What time is it?” Steve asks.

“Almost one in the afternoon,” Buck says. “Stevie, please. You never sleep this late. And you’re so hot.”

Steve tries to make a salacious noise to lighten Buck’s worry but it just comes out as a moan. He finally organizes his thoughts enough to recognize what’s happening.

“Malaria,” Steve groans. “Doc said it could come back.”

“Jesus. I’m taking you to the hospital,” Buck says.

“No,” Steve says. “Pills in the bathroom. Sulfa-something.” He’s grateful that he’d never lost the habit of throwing nothing away; the quinine the Army hospital had sent him back into the field with in case he relapsed on a mission was still tucked into his first-aid kit.

Buck hurries into the bathroom and returns with the bottle, deftly unscrewing the cap one-handed as he sits on the mattress because it’s too damned hot in the summer to bother with the arm at home.

Buck shakes out a pill onto the nightstand, then sets the bottle down and takes the pill and pushes it between Steve’s lips. Steve swallows it dry before Buck can even reach for the glass of lukewarm water that’s been sitting by the bed all night, then sinks back into his pillow.

“I’ll be better in a few hours,” he mumbles. He’s too tired to keep his eyes open. “Had the chills this morning. This is the fever stage. Sweats are next, and then it’ll break for a while. It’ll start again tomorrow.”

“How long does it last?”

Steve shrugs. “A week maybe. Two. I don’t know. It’s never happened before.” Then, “Don’t worry. You can’t catch it.”

“I don’t care,” Buck says softly, bending down to kiss Steve on his temple. “I’ll take care of you.”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve says, though he’s not entirely sure he believes it. He’d forgotten how bad the bone-breaking pain in his joints had been when he had it the first time, in Laos. “You have work.”

“I’ll see if Sam can cover my shifts this week. He’s been wanting more hours anyway.”

“You have this all figured out,” Steve said, his voice feeling loose in his head. He manages to peel one eye open enough to see the worry scribbled plain across Buck’s face.

“Nothing to figure out,” Buck says, closing his hand around Steve’s.

*****

By evening, Steve is feeling strong enough to move to the sofa for a little while to watch a Mets game on TV. Buck heats up some soup and makes tea, then as Steve sips those down, he goes down to the laundry room to get the sheets from the washer and carries them up six flights of stairs to hang on the line on the roof. How he does it one-handed, Steve doesn’t know and doesn’t insult Buck by asking—he does it, and that’s enough.

“It’s gonna be expensive, washing my sheets every day,” Steve says weakly as he comes back in.

“I’ll bring mine over later,” Buck says, unconcerned. “My bed’s the same size as yours.”

“Might as well move in,” Steve says, pushing the bowl of soup away and lying back on the sofa to close his eyes. Buck tucks a crocheted blanket around him and kisses his forehead. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Steve mumbles a laugh, realizing that something important has just happened, but he’s too tired to follow the thought through. Buck gets a beer from the fridge and sits on the floor by Steve’s side, and gives him a quiet running commentary of the action on the screen so he doesn’t have to open his eyes.

He drifts back to sleep as Buck is saying, “This Nolan Ryan kid’s got a helluva arm, Stevie. Think he’s gonna go places.”

*****

The fever returns. He’s vaguely aware of Buck throwing the windows open and wrestling a bag of ice into a steel tub at the foot of the bed and turning the fan onto it to help cool him down. He’s lying in nothing but his underwear on a bed of towels to soak up his sweat, while Buck dabs him with a rag dipped in ice water. The room is thick with the scent of diesel and salt air and garbage from the alley wafting up from below, and somewhere someone is cooking on a grill on a rooftop nearby, because he can smell the charcoal, smell the meat, and all of a sudden he’s back in Bangkok on R&R, wandering with through the streets of Patpong in a desperate quest to drink away the ghosts and find out if he still knew how to be a human being.

He’d learned of The Orchid Lounge by chance—a Marine at the USO briefing when they landed had laughed about a buddy walking into it without realizing what it was—and Steve had laughed along with him, but something about it had burrowed away in his mind, and after two hours of drinking with the Marine and a few other Americans at the Mississippi Queen that night, exhausted at feigning interest in the gogo dancers on the other side of the bar, he begged off with a headache and left.

But instead of going back to his room, he found himself walking through the red-light district, not exactly looking for the Orchid Lounge but not exactly not looking for it either, until he came to stop in an alley in front of a door with a pair of twining flowers painted on the wall above it.

And then, without quite understanding why, he went inside. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting but it wasn’t this loud, bright, joyful place full of men and women who, upon closer inspection, seemed to be men, too. He had never seen anything like it, didn’t know what to make of any of it.

He told himself it was just curiosity that drew him to take a seat at the bar and order a beer. Less than a minute later, a young Thai man in a bright pink silk blouse sat down next to him so closely that not even Steve could mistake his meaning, perched a Navy cap on his head stolen from a sailor across the bar, and introduced himself as Joe.

“Buy me a drink, Captain?” he asked, tipping the Navy cap low over Steve’s eyes as he did. Steve realized Joe was wearing mascara and some kind of floral perfume. Realized it made him feel a way he couldn’t explain. Realized he couldn’t breathe.

Steve had abruptly stood up and pushed his way through the crowd to the door, and then pushed his way through the crowded streets outside until he found an alley, barely wide enough to admit him. He leaned against the wall and buried his face in his hands, hyperventilating for reasons he could not fully articulate. Because he was afraid, certainly, and relieved, and profoundly, achingly sad for Peggy, who had done nothing to deserve a man like him.

Because there was no harm in being queer if you had a wife and did your duty to her, no harm if you never touched a man, never looked at one the way he wanted to, never so much as spoke of it, knew that there was no harm in thinking about sweet Arnie Roth from East Flatbush when you rubbed one out in the latrines late at night, because there was no God to know what was in his heart, no God to damn him for it, because God had died for Steve in that massacre near the Banghiang River and He was never coming back.

There was no harm in being queer if you never did anything about it, but he was going to do something, had to do something, had to risk his career and break his wife’s heart because he had to know this thing about himself, had to look it in the eye and let it in, because finally, finally, he knew he would die if he didn’t.

He already knew how this night would end. Already knew he would find his way back to the bar, back to Joe. Knew he would buy Joe a drink, and then another, and that when Joe suggested they go somewhere quieter, Steve would go with him. Knew that for ten bucks and the price of a couple of beers, his life was going to change forever.

“Forgive me, Peg,” he said aloud, as though she could hear him, as though it would matter. And then he wiped his eyes on his sleeve, squared his shoulders, and returned to the bar.

*****

He awakens in his bed, sweat soaked and shaking, with Buck dabbing a cold, wet cloth to his forehead. He manages to flutter his eyes open long enough to note that it’s daytime, but not long enough to track the sun to know if it’s morning or afternoon, or what day it is at all. He’s vaguely aware that time has passed, that there has been at least one afternoon, maybe two, and one shower, maybe two, since the last time he was truly present.

“Hey baby,” Buck says softly, brushing his hair back and kissing his brow. “Want to try another cool shower?”

Steve grunts a no, then swallows dryly. “Water,” he mumbles.

Buck helps him sit up and holds the glass to his lips. “You need to take your pill,” he said. “I called the pharmacy and they sent over some Tylenol for your fever, too.”

Steve grunts again, too tired to argue, and lets Buck push the tablets into his mouth. He doesn’t want to think about how much it cost Buck to have the Tylenol delivered.

“You hungry?” Buck asks, because he knows better than to ask if Steve’s in pain—that much is clear.

“No,” Steve whispers. “Just tired.” He gropes around until he finds a part of Buck to touch—his forearm, which he slides his hand down till their fingers clasp. “Stay for a bit?”

“You were dreaming,” Buck says, settling in more comfortably on the bed beside him. “You said, ‘Forgive me, Peg.’”

They don’t talk about her much. Buck knows he was married, and that it ended, and why it ended, and he knows that every month Steve wires her $100 in alimony that she always wires back the next day because the judge didn’t believe her when she said she preferred to support herself, and he knows that Steve wishes she would just take it so he could feel like he was atoning somehow.

Steve manages a weak smile. “Don’t worry about her.”

“I’m not,” Buck says. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Steve mumbles, lightly squeezing his hand. “I got a lot of regrets about Peg, but you’re not one of them.”

Buck’s quiet for a long time—so long that Steve opens his eyes to look at him again. Buck’s turned away, toward the window, and there’s a tear on his cheek that he hasn’t wiped away—because he doesn’t want to let go of Steve’s hand, he realizes.

“Guess I was talking about her a lot, huh?” he asks gently, squeezing Buck’s hand again.

Buck laughs a little and uses his shoulder to wipe his cheek. “You’re really sick, Steve,” he says finally. “If you need to talk to her—”

“I’m not gonna die from this, babe,” Steve says. “I promise.”

“I know that, silly,” Buck says, kissing the back of the hand, and the little fray around the edges of his voice tells Steve that he’s not so sure, that he’s trying to be brave. “What I mean is, if you ever need to talk to her, you can. She’s the closest thing to family you have anymore. I won’t be jealous.”

“Yes, you will,” Steve says. “But it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing left to say.”

“If you say so,” Buck says doubtfully.

“Can we argue about this later?” Steve asks.

“Yes,” Buck says, kissing his hand and then laying the cool cloth on his forehead. “You rest for a bit. We’ll try the shower this afternoon.”

“Was kind of hoping I was bad enough for a sponge bath,” Steve says, and he grins, but his eyes are already closing.

Buck laughs softly, then kisses his hand again. “Enough. Sleep.”

*****

What is it about sickness that makes a man revisit every regret he’s ever had? But here they come, marching back as fresh as if they’d happened yesterday.

The thing is, they really had been happy together, Steve and Peg. They’d laughed—God, had they laughed—and he’d genuinely loved her, in his way, had delighted in her company, felt at home with her in ways he never had before. She was quick-witted, principled, and clever, impatient of low expectations and hungry to explore the world. She was unlike any other woman he’d ever met.

They’d met while he was stationed in Berlin to man one of the checkpoints to the Soviet sector and she was a translator at the British Embassy, which Steve was pretty sure meant she worked for MI-6, but he knew better than to ask. One of Steve’s buddies was dating one of Peggy’s pals, and they had conspired to set them up so they could double-date together. Dugan and Lorraine split up not long after, but Steve and Peggy didn’t, and six months later he took her to Paris to propose.

She’d had to quit her job after she got married, and that had made her sad, but she’d never stopped paying attention to international affairs, and Steve absolutely loved the look on the faces of the other officers at parties where she offered up brilliantly informed opinions on the Vienna Summit and the partition of East Germany with a devastatingly charming smile.

“Better watch that one, Rogers,” Col. Phillips had said that year at their Christmas party. “Smart girls are nothing but trouble.”

Steve had just put a protective arm around Peg’s back and smiled. “That’s true, sir,” he said politely. “But I’ll take smart over boring any day of the week.”

They’d laughed about it later that night in their kitchen, trading sips of scotch from the same glass while Steve rubbed her sore feet. “You don’t have to totter around on those pins on my account, you know,” he said as she winced. “You could wear your house shoes for all I care.”

She had just laughed. “Good grief, just because I’m your wife now doesn’t mean I can’t still try to seduce you occasionally!”

In retrospect, Steve realized he’d had a moment too long to respond. He knew Peg was pretty, knew he caught a lot of men’s eyes, but to him she was pretty the way stained-glass windows were pretty, or the leaves on the trees on a brilliant fall day, or the way New York looked when it was all lit up at night. It made no difference to him whether she was wearing a ballgown or a housecoat or nothing at all—his love for her had nothing at all to do with her body.

But every few months, with the help of a couple of drinks, a dark room, and the memory of Arnie’s smile—a trick he had not yet mustered the courage to interrogate the meaning of—he could get hard long enough to give her a few minutes of pleasure and, he hoped, the baby they both wanted. He rarely stayed hard long enough to come, though—instead he would pretend, once he felt himself going soft again, so she wouldn’t be disappointed. Years passed and there was no baby, and they talked about adopting, but the Army moved them around so much that it never worked out. It was the hope for the baby that kept him going when he started to feel low about the charade, when he started to realize that his feelings for men were real, and strong, and wracked him with guilt he didn’t know how to manage. Peg deserved someone who loved her unconditionally, and he couldn’t even give her that.

Perhaps he should have realized it then, that night after the Christmas party, when he could not seem to access the words he knew she wanted him to say. He just looked at her over the glass of scotch for a long minute, then he smiled, leaned toward her, closed his eyes, and kissed her.

He still has the letter Peg wrote to him after he asked for the divorce, folded neatly around a small print of their wedding portrait that he’d brought to Laos with him and his wedding ring—all he had to show for a decade-long failed marriage. He wasn’t sure why he’d kept it, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. Maybe he just needed the scar to remind him of how badly he’d hurt her.

_Dear Steve,_

_I’m writing to let you know that I have received your letter, and that I’ve decided to file for divorce as you requested._

_Does that surprise you? I have to admit that my first instinct was to refuse, but if I must be honest, I have always wondered if we would ever truly last. From the first day we met I saw that distance in you, some piece of you that always seemed to glance over my shoulder, as if you were expecting someone else to arrive at any moment. You tell me you’re abandoning me but you won’t say for whom, but you don’t need to. All the little things I noticed, or tried to excuse or explain away—I think we both know it isn’t another woman that you’re leaving me for._

_Perhaps this is why I cannot bring myself, for the first time in my life, to fight for this. The thing I want to fight for no longer exists. I suppose it never did._

_I won’t make this easier for you by lying and saying that I understand why you married me in the first place, because I don’t. I loved you and you lied to me, and I suppose I let you, because I wanted to believe so very badly that what we had was true. (I’m not entirely convinced that it wasn’t.) I’m embarrassed and sad and lonely and I’m so very, very angry at you for letting this go on as long as it did._

_But as angry as I am, I can’t bring myself to hate you. I will always remember our first year in Berlin together, the shy way you would court me, the earnest joy on your face when we would visit the museums together, the sheer boyish delight the first time I took you ice skating. When you took me to Paris to propose, you were so nervous your hands were shaking, and all I wanted to do was take them in mine, and reassure you that everything would be all right. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I knew even then that it wouldn’t be._

_You tried so hard, Steve. You were so determined to be a good husband, and you were, until you couldn’t do it anymore. One of the things I loved best about you is how much you believed in hope, and that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Hope that things could somehow be different with every new posting, every new house, every new town. I just wish you could have talked to me about this. I wish you could have trusted me with the truth._

_But it’s too late for that now, isn’t it? I just wish_ —and here, something was scribbled out— _I wish things had been different. Perhaps I’m flattering myself to believe you do, too._

_Good luck, Steve. We had a good run._

_Love,_

_Peg_

He’d read the letter a dozen times, wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake, wondering if there was some way they could have continued, if there was some way he could ask her to give him the freedom to—

To what, exactly? To sit across the table from her at breakfast every morning wondering what it would be like to share that table with a man? To take her out to dinner, to parties, to pretend they were anything other than the dear friends they were? To try to ignore the sounds of her fucking her own finger in the bathroom in the middle of the night to tide herself over during the long months between the rare occasions that Steve could muster up the will to give her the pleasure she deserved? To sneak out with men when he could, far from home so he would not embarrass her, furtive moments of pleasure and relief that could never become anything more? All for the dubious privilege of remaining married to a man who had murdered—

But that wasn’t what she’d asked for, was it? She’d just wanted to talk to him one last time. She’d just wanted to understand why her marriage had ended. Hadn’t he at least owed her the dignity of that?

Forgive me, Peg.

*****

Buck is stronger than he looks. Steve tries not to lean on him as Buck helps him to the bathroom, tries not to aggravate the steel pins in his spine, but Buck won’t have it. He pulls Steve’s arm around his shoulders and holds his arm tightly around Steve’s waist as if to hoist him up. “Thank you,” he murmurs softly as Buck helps him step over the edge of the bathtub with shaking legs, then sits him down on the wooden stool Buck’s put in there for him to rest on. Distantly, he thinks the water will ruin it, but he’s too wiped out to care.

Sitting down, he can undress himself, handing the sweat-soaked undershirt and shorts to Buck to add to the ever-growing pile of laundry. Buck turns on a spray of cool water and lets Steve sit there while Buck lathers him up with soap to wash the sticky residue of sweat away. Steve has a plastic pitcher in the kitchen and Buck uses it to pour cold water down his chest and legs so he doesn’t have to turn on the stool into the spray to rinse off. Steve swallows his pride and lets Buck dote, lets him feel like he’s doing something useful against this sonofabitch of a parasite.

He hates how awful he feels, but he doesn’t want to fight it, wants to feel every ache and chill and headache, wants to surrender to the weakness, wants to let it beat him up, let it eat him alive, let it humiliate him, this microscopic ghost he’s carried home from the scene of crime after crime after crime.

He’d caught it in Laos, which was fitting because it was the first place he’d ever killed anyone. He’d fired his weapon a few times in Korea, just warning shots, and once in Germany to blow out the tire of an East German car that was trying to run the checkpoint he was guarding, but that was it. He’d put in for the Green Berets because he thought there would be war with Soviet Union, and he’d be stopping a nuclear attack. He thought he’d be standing up to the biggest bully of them all. He never thought he’d be slaughtering villagers in a secret war in a neutral country. 

They’d called in an airstrike on a Pathet Lao army camp near a village on the Vietnamese border, and watched in horror as the bombs kept falling, obliterating the houses as easily as they had the camp. It was a cloudy day, and Steve later learned that the pilots had reported that they couldn’t tell where the camp ended and the village began, and after Steve demanded to know why they hadn’t aborted if the visibility was that bad, they claimed no, Steve had never warned them about the village in the first place, and then they said Steve had said to hit the camp ‘and’ the village instead of ‘not’ the village, and their story kept changing and Steve was so fucking exhausted, already deliriously sick though he didn’t know it yet, that he began to doubt himself, doubt whether he had been clear enough about the civilians nearby, whether he had gotten the coordinates right, whether he’d mentioned the village at all.

Whether it was the Air Force who fucked up or him, it made no difference to the people he’d gotten killed. His horror meant nothing to them.

Sometimes he believed he’d been tricked into thinking he was doing the right thing, but sometimes he thought he hadn’t been, that maybe he’d known all along that he was being used for something monstrous, something so utterly wrong that he’d be too ashamed to speak of it even if he’d been allowed to.

He knew Buck had done something similar, that he’d accidentally hurt civilians, too. He’d mentioned it only once, after a nightmare left him screaming and kicking so hard Steve was afraid he’d hurt himself, but even then he didn’t tell Steve everything, just that some kids had died and they were the ones who’d done it. Sometimes Steve wonders if either one of them will ever really be able to talk about what they’d seen over there. What they’d done.

Sometimes he wonders why he didn’t question it. Why he didn’t just walk away. But things look different in country, when you’ve got your men to protect. They were warned about the fog of war, how confusing it can become on the ground in the chaos of the moment, but he didn’t truly understand until he got there what they meant. He didn’t understand, either, how much your allegiance shrinks down to a nation of a dozen men whose only job in the world is to make sure your brothers come home, period. There are missions and objectives and rules of engagement and you execute them because that’s your job, but nobody gives a damn about Communists or Russia or even the United States—all you believe in is each other. That’s it. That’s the only reason you keep fighting. That’s the only reason you’re alive at all.

And then you get home and realize—

Maybe that’s why he needs Buck so badly. Because they _don’t_ have to talk about it. Because he understands, too.

*****

Later, he dreams of Arnie.

They’d met in Korea, where they’d both been sent to mop up after the war. It had been a miserable posting—by turns dull and utterly heartbreaking, guarding the border with the North and watching the Koreans struggle through those early difficult years to rebuild the country that the U.S. Army had helped destroy.

The only bright spot in all of it was Arnie Roth, 19 years old and gawky as a stork, with a shock of red hair that caught Steve’s eye in the mess hall his first day on base. He arrived at the tail end of Steve’s tour, in August of ‘57, just three months before Steve was set to rotate back to the States.

Steve had been too shy to do anything but let their gazes touch a little too long over a mess table or a beer—not so much shy as oblivious, he thinks, because he hadn’t really understood what it meant at the time. All he knew was that he was so desperately lonely, still grieving for his mom and so far away from New York he couldn’t begin to visualize the distance of it, and there was Arnie Roth from East Flatbush sitting right across the table, offering quiet conversation to fill the silence when Steve was so sad he could barely speak, meaningless chatter about the Dodgers and Coney Island in a Brooklyn accent so familiar Steve could almost close his eyes and pretend he was home.

Steve thought it was Brooklyn that had brought them together, the novelty of finding a friend who’d grown up less than a mile away from you sitting across the table from you on the other side of the world, thought it was Brooklyn that made them close, gave them things to talk about. Steve thought it was Brooklyn that made him crave Arnie’s company, seek him out at the mess, at the enlisted club, at the little exercise room where the men would do pushups and pull-ups to while away the hours when they weren’t on duty. 

Steve thought it was Brooklyn that made Arnie grab his sleeve one night and drag him over to a dark corner of the camp to look up at the bright little spot that was Sputnik as it passed silently overhead.

“It’s only a matter of time before there’s a man up there, Stevie,” Arnie said, wonderingly.

“If the Russkies don’t drop an atom bomb on us first,” Steve said. Arnie’s fingers were still clutched around the fabric of Steve’s sleeve, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything, or twist his arm away.

Arnie turned toward Steve then, with a look on his face Steve didn’t fully understand, but for a brief moment he found himself wondering if Arnie wanted to kiss him. It was a strange feeling, one he batted away almost as soon as it arrived, because he realized he wouldn’t have minded, that if he let him think about it for too long, he’d realize that he wanted it, too.

“Life’s short,” Arnie said, and God, if only they’d known how short it would be for him, that he would only have one more year to live, maybe it would have been different, maybe they would have taken the chance, maybe Arnie would have gotten to know what it was like before he stepped on that landmine.

But Steve just looked away, looked back up at Sputnik, and said, “Who do you think’ll get up there first? Us or them?”

And Arnie’s fingers relaxed and released, and he swallowed and cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “I dunno, Stevie,” he said, not quite able to hide the glumness in his voice. “Maybe if we’re lucky it’ll be someone else.”

Even now the shame of that night aches. His cowardice, his confusion, his inability to see himself for who he was, his inability to give Arnie just one moment of authenticity before he died—God, what he wouldn’t give to have a chance to do that night over again.

Steve has never—will never—tell Buck the truth about the crushingly lonely summer that led to their meeting. How the riot at the Stonewall had unmoored him in a way he couldn’t properly articulate, how the darkness within him had steadily gathered until one hot, sleepless afternoon in late July he found himself in front of the television with his loaded service weapon in his hand, watching a flickering black-and-white live video of a man stepping onto the surface of the moon. How the wonder of it had stopped him, had made him reconsider what bravery was, made him wonder if there was another way out of hell, if there was a place for him on Earth after all.

How it set him on a six-week reconnaissance mission through Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side in search of a place where he could finally feel at home in the world. How the darkness crept back bit by bit as every place he visited felt colder than the last—that is, when they weren’t too fearful of a new face to admit him in the first place.

“You look like a cop,” one doorman had finally explained, and Steve had not argued because he was an armed security guard for the Port Authority and that was probably close enough. But he hadn’t been a civilian since 1953 and it would have showed no matter what kind of job he had, so he just kept trying.

He’s never told Buck how Josie’s had been the last bar on his list, how he didn’t know what he was going to do if this place turned its back on him, too. How he didn’t _want_ to know.

How Buck’s smile made him realize he was never going to have to find out.

He'd never told Buck that it was he who’d given Steve the courage to switch to days, to live in the light again, to face whatever he had to face as the man it had cost him everything to become. He’d never told Buck and he never would, because Buck didn’t need that, didn’t need the weight of his salvation to carry on top of everything else. Buck had his own sorrows to bear—he didn’t need Steve’s, too.

But Steve thinks about Arnie and that missed opportunity to kiss him and he doesn’t want to do it again, can’t do it again, can’t let himself go on without knowing what it means to give yourself to someone the way he’d wanted so desperately to do with Peg and to feel the clarity he felt with Joe. And now here’s Buck, and his ma always said things come in threes, and maybe that means something, maybe it has to mean something—

“Buck,” he murmured, rolling over to face him. Buck is sitting in a chair next to the bed, reading in the dying daylight, but as soon as he hears Steve move he shuts the book and moves to his side.

“What do you need, Stevie?” he asks, carding his fingers through Steve’s sweat-damp hair.

“Thank you for this,” Steve mumbles, reaching up and clasping Buck’s hand in his. “I just—thank you.”

Buck laughs softly and kisses his forehead. “Of course, baby,” he says. “I’m not letting you out of my sight till you’re better.”

Something breaks in Steve then, and he gulps and finds himself tearing up. He laughs to cover it, but it just makes it worse.

“Oh Stevie, no, what’s wrong?” Buck asks, concerned and laughing all at once, and it’s proof that he knows Steve well enough to know nothing’s really wrong, that whatever it is isn’t bad, and that just makes Steve blubber even more. “You’re exhausted, baby.”

“I love you,” Steve says suddenly, because he can’t go another second without saying it. The words come out fast, almost angry in their urgency, but he can tell from the look on Buck’s face that he knows it’s not anger at all.

“I love you too, baby,” Buck says, softly but grinning as he plants a tender kiss on Steve’s mouth. “You think I’d be doing all this if I didn’t?”

“I just—” Steve says, and Buck is smiling so wide, he feels like he’s missed the joke. “What’s so funny?”

“You’ve been saying that for the past three days,” he said, laughing again and kissing Steve’s hand. “You think you could actually remember this time? Because it’s killing me to watch you muster up the courage each time.”

“I have?” Steve says stupidly. “Don’t take advantage of a sick man.”

“I would never,” Buck says, fluttering his eyelids in mock innocence.

“How long were you going to let me keep making a fool of myself?” Steve asks.

“Honestly? For as long as you were going to keep doing it,” Buck says. “I’m not gonna get tired of hearing it, you know.”

Steve squeezes his hand. “I’m not gonna get tired of saying it,” he says.

Buck looks at him, a serious, steady look, the corner of his mouth quirked up into a hint of a smile. “Then I guess we’re just gonna have to keep saying it, aren’t we?”

“Guess we are.”

“I can live with that,” he says, leaning over to kiss Steve again.

Steve catches hold of him lightly, holds his face close and looks right into his eyes, and feels something deep, deep, deep inside him settle into place, the mending of a fracture he’d never realized was broken before.

“Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments give me life. Hit me up on the bird app if you wanna: [@PendragonBea](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea).


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